The surface tiles contained in Surf.tree are all 512x512 pixels. I don't know where you spotted 2048 and 1024 sizes, but that should not be the case. (the only exception being the global level 1, 2, and 3 tiles, but we can ignore those for this discussion).

So if your Ascension base tiles are larger than 512x512, you need to cut them into 512x512 pieces. If they are smaller, you need to glue them together into 512x512 pieces (hopefully, they will already have power-of-2 size, otherwise it may get a bit messy).

Next, resolution. If you know the resolution of your Ascension tiles (pixel/degree), then it is easy to figure out at what resolution level they fit into the tile tree:

- level 4 (the base of the quadtree) has a resolution of 1024/360 pixel/degree.
- each subsequent level has twice the resolution of the previous level.

If you don't know the resolution of your tiles, it may be easiest to simply zoom into tileedit, until the view represents exactly the area of one of your 512x512 tile cuts (at a lower resolution, presumably). You can then read off the resolution, as well as the longitude and latitude indices, directly from the info box in the top left corner.

Inserting your tiles: This is actually quite easy. Assuming you found the appropriate tile location in tileedit corresponding to one of your 512x512 ascension tiles, you just have to convert the tile to DXT1 format if not already done, and then copy it to Textures\Earth\Surf\XX\YYYYYY\ZZZZZZ.dds where XX is the resolution level, YYYYYY is the latitude index, and ZZZZZZ is the longitude index you read off from the info box in tileedit. If you then navigate back to that tile in tileedit, it should show the new tile in all its high-res glory.

Once you have inserted the tiles at their highest available resolution, you should also add at least some of the lower resolution levels:

- glue an appropriate set of 2x2 tiles together to a single 1024x1024 tile, and interpolate it down to 512x512. All basic image processing tools (e.g. gimp) can do that.
- convert to DXT1, and insert again in the correct place in the tree directory structure.

You may have to repeat that for a couple of levels, but certainly not all the way down to level 1. Simply check that the jump from original texture to your texture is no longer very obvious, as you zoom across the transition.

You may have to adjust the water colour of your tiles to match seamlessly with the surrounding ocean (surface tiles don't support transparency, so you can't simply cut away the water areas).

Also, in addition to the surface tiles, you will have to edit the corresponding water mask tiles. I noticed that the water mask for Ascension island is really messed up.

I don't know where you spotted 2048 and 1024 sizes, but that should not be the case.

Look in marco's Ascension 2016 addon, their are 2048 in the level 14 folder and a 1024 in level 15 folder...?

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Once you have inserted the tiles at their highest available resolution, you should also add at least some of the lower resolution levels:
...
You may have to repeat that for a couple of levels, but certainly not all the way down to level 1. Simply check that the jump from original texture to your texture is no longer very obvious, as you zoom across the transition.

So there is no hard and fast rule for how many resolutions you *need* to cover. Once you have set the highest it's just a matter of how smooth you want transitions to be?
That would be a very handy util, one that allows you to drop in your highest res with relevant long lat and let the util to do the combining and scaling process for you! too much to ask? :D :D

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I noticed that the water mask for Ascension island is really messed up.

i noticed that too actually. Does that have any actual visual effect on the rendering, assuming, as is the the case with Ascesnsion, all the land is above see level?

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Originally Posted by Face

Nope. It is just your old base as you've committed it to ORL. In order to show it there, it had to be remapped, integrated, alpha merged, masked and terrain flattened.

ah ok, so quite a lot has actually gone on there to get that pic. So is the only element missing the elevation data? For which I assume we would just use your hairy face!? :D :D

Look in marco's Ascension 2016 addon, their are 2048 in the level 14 folder and a 1024 in level 15 folder...?

That would be incorrect, since it messes up the LOD adjustment. The 1024x1024 level 15 tiles should be split into 512x512 tiles and added at level 16. After that, the level 14 and level 15 tiles should be interpolated down to 512x512.

ah ok, so quite a lot has actually gone on there to get that pic. So is the only element missing the elevation data? For which I assume we would just use your hairy face!? :D :D

You could, but you might get entangled in my curly beard .
You could of course also use ele2png to convert the elevation to an image, edit it with whatever graphics program you want (that reads/writes at least 8-bit color PNG), then convert it back to elevation.

That's only, and this was regularly used for bases addons, a false "skip level". Whatever the initial size of a dds, in pixels, for a base in orbiter 2010 or 2016, it is primarily a field angle at a level of it's integration (see the table I put here and there and recently in the treeman topic).

That in this angle, one can put 12, 59, 237, 1125 pixels..., orbiter will adjust those values to a value of 256 pixels base size of a cell. in the 2010 version or in 2016 version of 512.

Thus, to a level considered, if one use - and here for example in orbit 2010 - an image of 256 pixels ... that will end in 256 pixels in orbiter, one can not expect anything to gain, in terms of details. But if one use an image of 1024 pixels while although reduced to 256 pixels, it will appear maybe more detailed.

But after all, it might as well be created in a higher level. What advantage do this rather than that ? I'm not sure that those who have done well understood what they were doing. But maybe i lost something on that subject.

Orbiter, I had seen it with night textures, resize smooth. Something like Lanczos or bicubic. What we can do in an image editor.